Artist Anna Von Mertens '95 with two of her quilted pieces at the deCordova Biennial.

The Boston Globe called them “slash artists.” Guest curator Abigail
Ross Goodwin ’98 and her cocurator Dina Deitsch say that “mediums and
genres have been cracked open and slip from one into another” in the
work of the twenty-three artists featured at this winter’s biennial
exhibition of the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum outside Boston.

It’s not just that the artists work in mixed media:
installation/sculpture, performance/photography, and every other
combination you can imagine. They also blur the lines between public
and private, politics and aesthetics, art and craft. As Goodwin and
Deitsch write in the biennial’s catalogue: “‘high’ and ‘low’ forms of
art find new life in their intermingling.”

A prime example of what Goodwin calls “hybridity” is the art of Anna
Von Mertens ’95, a Peterborough, New Hampshire, quilter. This is not
your mother’s quilting. Von Mertens says her work “has a traditional
backbone, but it’s nothing like what you think.” From a distance, the
quilts in Von Mertens’s Look to the Heavens
series look like minimalist paintings: an entire canvas in shades of a
single color. But closer inspection reveals that each is a starscape.
Von Mertens uses a computer program to calculate exactly what the stars
would have looked like from a particular earthly vantage point on a
particular day in history when “science, religion, and astrology
intersect,” as she describes it.

Jupiter Rising, for instance, portrays the sky on January 7,
1610, as seen from Padua, Italy: the date and location when Galileo
first discovered that the earth revolves around the sun. A Star in the East,
in rich blue and yellow, portrays the sky on February 25, 6 B.C., in
Bethlehem—as it might have looked to the Magi. In another series,
called You and Me, Von Mertens uses thread to map electric current circulating around two magnetic poles.

All her work is hand-dyed and hand-stitched—“not because I’m a martyr,”
Von Mertens says, “but because there’s a narrative that is embedded in
the piece. So much of my work I think of as a kind of mapping.
Literally tracing these routes with my hands is an important layer of
the work.”

Although Von Mertens knew from an early age that she wanted to be an
artist, “I chose Brown knowing that I wasn’t choosing art school,” she
says. “I wanted a solid liberal arts education.” Her choice was
reaffirmed when, during a lecture, Professor of Biology Ken Miller
announced that artists often make the best scientists. In both cases,
he told the class, “It’s all about pattern recognition.”

Von Mertens returns to this idea constantly, as more and more of her
work centers on “observable phenomena,” she says: “looking out into the
world and seeing patterns emerge.”

Goodwin and Von Mertens did not know each other at Brown. In fact, they
met for the first time in February of last year when Goodwin and her
cocurator, Deitsch, arrived in Von Mertens’s Peterborough studio
searching for work to include in the biennial. Together, they made more
than 100 studio visits and examined hundreds more portfolios with the
goal of creating a survey of art and artists working in New England.

Now an independent curator, Goodwin owned and directed Boston’s Judi
Rotenberg Gallery before closing it last spring to spend more time with
her three young daughters. She had always planned a career in the arts,
but the late art history professor Kermit Champa steered her toward
gallery work and arranged a key internship. “Champa’s language about
art—the way he encouraged close looking, his poetic
interpretations—really added to my love of art,” she says. “He was
really a magical professor.” Curating, she adds, “is an incredibly
creative act—putting the work together, conceptualizing a show, making
decisions about where things go in a space, creating an experience for
visitors—that process has always been satisfying.”

And it was that process that brought her to Von Mertens’ studio last
winter. “Anna really stood out immediately in her combining of
thoughtful intellect, incredible skill and craft, and the aesthetics of
the end product,” says Goodwin. And it’s the “slash,” in part, that
gives Von Mertens’ work its power. “I am drawn to these scientific
phenomena—this sort of more ‘masculine realm’ of ideas,” Von Mertens’s
says, “and by using quilting and the hands, it kind of reverses the
point of view of what I’m looking at—it’s much more subjective and
personal.”

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The Brown Alumni Magazine is published bimonthly, in print since 1900.